


4AM

by The_lazy_eye



Series: Junctures in Time [2]
Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery, Anne with an E (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Getting Together, Growing Up Togther, Humor, Slow Dancing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:21:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23709094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_lazy_eye/pseuds/The_lazy_eye
Summary: They hadn’t planned for this. It was supposed to be an easy day off, two friends catching up after the brutal torture of midterms.It’s been too long, let’s go for a walkshe’d said about an hour before screamingthat weatherman is a dirty, filthy liar!
Relationships: Gilbert Blythe/Anne Shirley
Series: Junctures in Time [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1712668
Comments: 47
Kudos: 234





	4AM

“I’m disgusting,” Anne whines, ringing her hair out on the tile of her entryway and carefully stepping out of her shoes. Gilbert follows suit, mimicking her each move and only stepping out onto the carpet once his socks are off and his jeans have been properly cuffed. “I’m going to go shower.”

“Alright,” He hums, “What do you want me to do about all this?” He gestures to himself for emphasis, knowing her well enough to predict that she doesn’t want him dripping rain water all over her apartment.

They hadn’t planned for this. It was supposed to be an easy day off, two friends catching up after the brutal torture of midterms. _It’s been too long, let’s go for a walk_ she’d said about an hour before screaming _that weatherman is a dirty, filthy liar!_

She scans him for a moment, considering his words before disappearing straight down the hall and into her bedroom. She emerges a moment later, holding up a pair of shorts and an old shirt. One he recognizes from high school.

“Jesus, I haven’t seen that in years.” He takes it from her and holds it out. It’s faded down into a washed out design of an old band logo. The bottom hem is worn and broken in several places, leaving it looking ragged. “Did you steal this?”

“Stealing is a loaded word,” She says, hands on hips and eyebrows cocked. “You gave it to me, remember?”

He feels his own eyebrows furrow as he racks his memories. The last time he saw this shirt was probably sophomore year, right before summer hit. He wore it to school –

“Oh, right. You tore your blouse scaling the fence in the student parking lot and needed something to wear.”

“Precisely. So, _no_ , I did not steal this from you. Forgot to give it back, maybe, but didn’t steal.”

“And it just so happened to make its way all the way to your college apartment without you ever remembering to give it back?”

She goes quiet for a second and there’s a moment where he swears he can see a blush creeping up the apples of her cheeks, but he can’t be sure. Sometimes she just gets rosy like that. He’s so focused on it that he misses what she says.

“What was that?”

She mumbles again, not even audible. She’s not looking at him, eyes cast down at her bare feet. He crowds her space, getting close enough to feel the chill of the rain radiating off her. “Anne, you’re going to have to speak up. I can’t possibly understand you with all that mumbling.”

“I said!” She huffs, stepping back and crossing her arms. She’s got her signature _try me_ look. A hint of indignance mixed with a challenging fire in her eyes. It never fails to trigger the responding smirk from Gilbert. “Sometimes I sleep in it!”

Well, that certainly wasn’t what he expected.

“You what?” He all but cackles, throwing his head back and letting his body rock back from the force of it. When he levels back out he can’t help feeling smug, as if he’s won some unspoken battle he didn’t know he was fighting in.

“It’s comfortable, okay? Jeez!” She storms off down the hall and part of him wants to follow her, wants to chase her through the apartment. It’s probably a leftover feeling from running through the rain, laughing with her as they got soaked from head to toe, and it’s hard to shut down. He’s still got some of that chaotic, playful energy coursing through his veins. The kind that only Anne brings out in him.

She shrieks when she realizes he’s come barreling after her, her stomping turning into sprinting. She’s not faster than him, though, something he’s smug about on normal days and thankful for today. Well, sort of thankful because what he does next isn’t exactly his smartest move.

He manages to wedge his body between the door and its frame as she slams it. His chest acts as a pretty thorough doorstop but it doesn’t prevent the wood from knocking into his head and sending it ricocheting back.

“Gil, you idiot!” Her hands are soothing over the knot on his forehead as he crumples down, vision dazed for only a second before the pain comes rippling through his head. Sharp and first and then ever fading. “I can’t believe you.”

“You’re going to kill me one of these days,” He groans, “Repetitive blunt force to the head has consequences.”

“Well, maybe you should think about that before you put yourself in these situations.”

"Anne Shirley, are you victim blaming me?”

That earns him a light smack to the shoulder. “You’re an instigator, Mr. Blythe, not a victim.”

“C’mon! I’m injured, take pity on me.” He gives her his best attempt at puppy dog eyes, the kind he knows she is immune to but always tries anyway, and she rolls her eyes.

“You’re going to catch your death in those clothes,” She sighs, helping him up.

By the time he’s peeled off the layer of wet clothes stuck to his skin and traded them for the warm, soft replacements she gave him, she’s got an ice pack and a glass of water waiting. He accepts both readily, pressing the ice to the bruise and wincing at the way pain flowers out before fading.

When she finally disappears into the bathroom and he hears the shower turn on, he misses her. He hadn’t realized how little they'd seen of each other since the semester began and it left a small, Anne sized hole in his chest. His clinical labs and her student teaching left them no time for the weekly dinners or study sessions they’d done in earlier years. It feels like they’re falling away from each other, losing their grips on the routines that kept them together.

He can’t be mad, though. She’s got her own friends and her future to prepare for. How can he expect her to make time for him when she’s got so many other things keeping her entertained? And he’s so busy, too. His classes take up more and more time, his labs go longer and nights get later. He can’t expect her to wait around for him to catch up. He can’t blame her.

Still, though. It’s like she’s slipping through his fingers and he doesn’t know how to stop it.

_________________________

“Gilbert Blythe you cad!” Anne shouts. It scares the crap out of him so badly he drops the book he was holding and trades it for his own chest, gripping his collar and willing his heart to climb down and out of his throat. “What are you doing in my bedroom?”

He shouts, mostly out of reflex. He also turns out of reflex and is greeted with a sight that only serves to jam his heart _even further_ up his throat until he can’t breathe. There she is, Anne Shirley, hair just as wet and deep red as before. Only this time it’s cascading down an expanse of porcelain skin, chasing little water droplets that fall even further down her skin, disappearing into the towel wrapped around her chest. Little droplets of water sneaking down and between…

“I’m sorry!”

What’s he apologizing for? Sneaking into her room? Going through her bookshelf? Staring at her?

At that thought, he rips his eyes away from her.

“I didn’t mean to intrude, I just wanted something to pass the time,” He justifies, giving a pointed look at the bookshelf he’s in front of.

It’s not a total lie, the books are the main reason he came in. He’d been twiddling his thumbs in her living room

He’d be lying, though, if he said the books are why he stayed.

Anne’s room is one of his favorite places on Earth. She’s got fairy lights strung about the ceiling and dried wildflowers hanging from different corners. Her walls are plastered with what looks like hundreds of polaroid pictures, familiar faces frozen in time to some of their favorite memories. Her dresser is in a preputial state of chaos, clothing spilling out of the drawers and open journals and notebooks strewn over top. Her bookshelf has so many books she’s run out of space, staking paperbacks on top of the one organized rows. Every single shelf has knickknacks aplenty. Every single time he’s in here, he sees something new.

He braces himself for the blunt, dull pain of her fist against his arm but it doesn’t come. Instead, it’s the _thwack_ of an openhanded smack that hardly registers as painful at all. It confuses him until he spares a glance at her and sees the playful smile on her face. “I can’t believe you. Did you at least find anything interesting?”

A nervous, relieved laugh escapes his chest and he turns back to the bookshelf, eyeing knickknacks before him. He grabs a tiny glass pig from its place in front of Jane Eyre. “This little guy is awfully cute.”

“Hamlet,” She says simply, as if it’s common knowledge. She plucks the pig from Gilbert's fingers, holding it up and letting rays of light fraction off of its glass corners. “I won it at an arcade.”

“Is that a pun?”

He sneaks a proper glance at her this time, really taking in the sight before him. Her wet hair is drying, little tangles and strands sticking up from the clumps that are still soaked. No braid holds it in, no pony-tail or carefully placed headband. It is unbidden. It’s messy and beautiful and so Anne and for a moment, he feels absolutely blessed by the heavens. This image of her, clean and messy all at once, belongs to only a select few people in the world and she has welcomed him into those ranks.

And her skin. Try as he might he is only human and he cannot help the wicked ways his eyes dart from one pure expanse to the next. The freckles that decorate her face are smattered down her shoulders and across the top of her chest. This knowledge isn’t entirely new; he’s seen her in bathing suits and low cut tops before but it sits differently with him now. He sees the way they vanish under the towel and he wants to follow them lower and lower, see how far they _truly_ go. He wants to trace them with his eyes, his fingers, his tongue. The idea has him sucking in a sharp breath as he tears his eyes back up to hers. Luckily, she’s still studying the glass pig she’d taken from him.

The tightness in his chest makes him feel awful, as if he’d truly taken something from her without asking. Those stolen glances come at a hefty price in his head and heart. “I’ll be out in the living room, then.”

He leaves her to change.

_________________________

They settle on a movie. The rain shows no sign of stopping and there’s _no way Gilbert’s going to walk back to his dorm when it’s raining cats and dogs_ , as Anne put it so they’re in it for the long haul. Not that he’s complaining. He’d be in anything with Anne for the long haul. He’d even suffer through her tragic taste in movies.

“Really, Anne? The Notebook?”

“I swear, you don’t have a single romantic bone in your body!”

“All they do is fight!”

He regrets it as soon as he says it. Anne gives him a sort of wounded look before huffing. He can only imagine what he looks like to her. Maybe it’s that same wounded look. All _they_ do is fight. Does that mean there’s no romance between them?

“Whatever.”

They watch it, anyway.

By the time Noah is yelling at Allie on the front lawn of that white house, they’ve got food in the oven and Anne’s burrowed into his side. He’s got an arm wrapped firmly around her shoulders and if she shakes a little, he doesn’t say anything.

Noah’s words echo in his ear.

_It’s gonna be really hard._

_We’re gonna have to work at this every day._

_I want you. I want all of you, forever._

It makes him think about Anne, how nothing with her has ever been easy. From the first moment they met he’s been climbing an uphill battle to get on her good side, to gain her trust and good standing. And now he has it, but it’s still hard. Sometimes it’s harder than before. Back then, he had to work twice as hard to get her to even look at him but there’d been no stake. There’d been nothing to lose. Now, though, he knows what it’s like to have her laugh at one of his jokes. He knows the gentle smile she reserves for her friends. He knows what it’s like to have her in his life and it would be impossible to lose her. Every time they fight, every time his brain stops working and her ire is pointed directly at him, he worries about losing her; about going back to the way things were in the beginning.

Losing her would crush him.

If she were Allie and he were Noah, just watching that car drive off his property would be the nail in the coffin.

He looks down to find her already looking up at him. “You okay?”

“Yeah, you?”

She nods, but doesn’t look away. There’s something intent about the way she stares at him, watery eyes flicking between his own before tracing the shape of his face. She shifts, coming up just a little bit to bring her hand up and follow the same path as her eyes. The touch is soft, gentle and it draws his eyes closed as he leans into her.

He wants to ask her what she’s doing but he doesn’t want to break the moment. One wrong move and the spell will snap. He could live in the valley of her touches for the rest of his life and if he tries to say anything, he might just say that. He can’t, though. It would ruin them.

His eyes are still furrowed shut but he can feel how close she is, her soft breath fanning out over his face. She’s close, so close that if either of them tips forward they’d kiss and he’s certain she means for them to. His chest burns where a hand presses into him, bracing her weight.

“Gilbert.”

For a moment, he’s sure she’s going to kiss him. Or, he’s going to kiss her. Either way, he’s dead sure it’s going to happen. They’re so close he can feel the way her breath fans out over his face, can hear the subtle hitch in her voice as she unconsciously hums.

Years and years of fantasizing, of wondering what it would be like for her soft lips to rest upon his. Nighttime dreams and daytime wonderings. He’s watched her in class, outside in his family’s garden, on stage reciting monologues, each time wondering what those smiles would taste like when mixed with his own. She would be sweet, he’s certain of that, but the taste would be unlike anything in the world. Impossible to build in a recipe book, unsuspecting flavors of cherry and honeysuckle mixed with something so unique to her. Something he will finally know if he would just tip his chin up.

She shifts, getting her legs underneath her. He feels the phantom brush of her lips, the telltale sign that this is it. It’s going to happen.

It’s going to –

_BEEP_

Anne jumps away from him so suddenly that the couch shifts and he finds himself tilting forward. He hardly has enough sense to catch himself before he’s face first in the cushion. When he looks up, Anne’s nearly sprinting into the kitchen.

It’s a few minutes before she returns, something he’s sort of grateful for. It gives him a chance to right his breathing, to force the heat from his face.

She walks back in with a plate of pizza bagels and two new beers, comfortably taking her seat on the couch where she can lean back against the armrest.

The plate rests on the couch between them. It feels like a fissure in a canyon. 

_________________________

She bids him goodnight with a throw blanket from her closet that smells like Green Gables. He hadn’t noticed before how different the two places smell, but the blanket triggers something deep inside the back of his head. Little vision of them: two young children playing hide and seek in the cupboards and under cushions; Anne’s twelfth birthday party, the one where they all took turns riding Belle around the property and Anne had gotten a Pokémon themed cake with Caterpie on it; two tired teenagers curled up by the hearth fire in her living room, textbooks spread around them as they crammed for whatever tests they had the next day. Little snippets of their childhood flash behind his eyelids as he takes a solid breath in, allowing himself to relish in their friendship.

He doesn’t sleep. He hardly even moves after he settles and down into the cushions. There’s a throw pillow propped comfortably under his neck in the way he always positions it when he stays the night. It’s comfortable and familiar but he still doesn’t sleep.

Not when the filler movie he put on stops playing and circles back to the main page. Not when the sleep timer finally kicks in and plunges the room into darkness.

Not as the clock blares bright red: two fifteen; three thirty.

It’s not that he’s not tired, he’s exhausted. His entire body screams at him for sleep. His arms burn and his stomach flips but his eyes stay glued to the dark ceiling. It wouldn’t matter if they were closed, his mind is barreling forward with the speed and weight of a freight truck. There’s no stopping it. Not tonight.

This battle is too familiar for him. He’s struggled with sleep in the past so badly that Mary and Bash asked his pediatrician to prescribe sleep medication after they had found him curdled up on the kitchen floor. He’d been frantically pacing, trying to wear himself out and somehow ended up sobbing on the linoleum. He wasn’t exactly quiet about it.

He stopped the sleep meds sometime his junior year and while he still faced one or two sleepless nights, learning to cope was better than all the side effects he’d dealt with.

It hardly rears its ugly head anymore. Not since his on again off again relationship with the college counseling center began. Sometimes, though, he feels it pressing into the backs of his eyes. It starts there and creeps into his brow, his temples, and down his throat. Tonight, it sits heavy in his chest, the events of the day playing like a broken record in his mind.

He almost doesn’t hear the bedroom door creak open or notice the dark figure that comes padding down the hall and into the kitchen. When the light never comes on, he thinks maybe he’d dreamt it. Maybe he’s finally hit the point of tired where he’s seeing shapes out of the corner of his eyes.

But no, it’s no hallucination. The sound of the fridge opening and closing is unmistakable. He gets out of his makeshift bed and makes way over, carefully but not quietly. The last thing he wants is to startle her.

“Good morning,” He hums, hoping to get a smile out of her.

“What are you doing up?” Her voice is raw, but not with sleep. It’s soft in the way the late night demands it to be, but there’s something he can’t identify underneath.

“Couldn’t sleep. What about you?”

She trades her answer for a shrug and silence settles between them. She busies her hands by setting up her kettle and he busies his own by wringing them in the bottom of his old, worn down t-shirt. There’s something hanging between them, heavy and sweltering but out of reach. 

“Anne,” He whispers, stepping into her space. He isn’t sure if it’s the comfort of nighttime or the way his brain stops working after a certain hour, but he can’t be bothered to be afraid anymore. Whatever stops him in the daylight, whatever’s held him back for years and years, it can’t touch him right now.

When he wraps his arms around her middle, it feels like he’s fitting into a puzzle piece. It’s so right to hold her, warm and solid and real in his arms with her back pressed against his chest. He can’t believe he’s never done this before, held her while she made tea. It feels so natural, like it’s something they should have been doing this whole time. His nose is practically buried in her hair and he lets himself sink into the smell of her shampoo, so bright and clean – so _Anne_.

She works around him, moving to grab two mugs and put a dollop of honey into each. One mug – a power ranger mug she’d gotten from Secret Santa last year – gets chamomile. The other – green with _I Don’t Give A Sip_ written on it – gets peach. All the while, she never once pushes his arms away.

It’s like she’s used to working with him wrapped around her.

 _Like maybe she wants him there_.

He doesn’t push the thought away. Not this time. that big, nasty unspeakable fear that normally claws its way up his throat can’t touch him here.

They stay pressed together until the kettle boils and only then does he let her go, too scared of accidentally causing rogue water to burn her delicate skin.

With the mugs prepared and cooling, they both find themselves restless. Something unspoken swells and he watches her, careful to not move too quickly as he steps back into her space. Softly, he takes her hands, bringing one up to rest around his neck while the other hangs low on his waist. He takes her in his arms as well, pulling her slightly closer.

And then he begins to sway.

There’s no music for them to keep rhythm to, no song to sing or beat to follow. He’s not even sure why he does it – brings her closer to him so he can dance with her in the empty quiet space they’ve found. There’s no real reason, nothing solid to make flimsy excuses from. There’s only one reason, simple and true. He did it because he wanted to.

The move slowly, Gilbert leading her in small circles around the kitchen. Once or twice he bumps against the counter but neither of them laughs. In the daylight she might make fun of him but here, in their own little world, it’s just another piece of the puzzle.

Eventually, they slow down to nothing but a gentle, rocking motion. The entire world falls away until it’s just them. Nothing else matters.

When she pulls him closer, he comes.

When she looks up at him with those beautiful gray eyes, he meets her gaze.

And when she pushes up onto her toes, he kisses her like she’s the purest breath of fresh air he’s ever tasted.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what this is. Is it flimsy with absolutely 0 plot? Yes. Is it self-indulgent? Yes. Do I have any idea what I’m doing? No. No I do not. But I wrote it anyway and here we are. Also, this is hardly edited and not beta’d so please, if you catch errors don’t hesitate to let me know. 
> 
> I’m not crazy about this but I put all the effort into writing it and I feel like it would be a shame to not post it. I really didn’t know where I was going when I started it, I just let the quarantine boredom take me wherever. And it landed here. I’m not one to write this kind of fic but I wanted to try my hand at it. Not a lot of angst, a decent amount of pining, and a quick happy ending. Practice makes perfect, though, right?
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it! Thanks so much for reading and making it this far. Please, please drop a comment and let me know what you think! I thrive on validation lmao. 
> 
> You can find me @ thelazyeye.tumblr.com!


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